The forgotten ‘90s action film with Henry Rollins, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and a weird premonition of the OJ Simpson case
Mention an IP called The Chase, and most people will presume you’re talking about the quiz show with ‘The Beast’. Back in 1994, though, it was the title of a low-budget comedy-action flick starring the former A-lister Charlie Sheen, who was a sinking star at the time, but still a decade shy of going into full “tiger blood” meltdown.
The Chase was directed by Adam Rifkin, better known to some as one of the nerds from Sixteen Candles, and co-starred Kristy Swanson, fresh off playing the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer. To summarise the largely unimportant plot as briefly as possible, Sheen is a wrongly convicted criminal who goes on the lam, hijacks a car at a Los Angeles gas station, and takes a young heiress, Swanson, hostage, with hopes of driving across the Mexican border to safety. The heiress, of course, gradually realises that Sheen is actually a nice dude, and they fall in love during the hours-long car chase after which the film is named.
While The Chase was mostly panned by critics and disappeared from cinemas with little fanfare in the early spring of 1994, it was certainly more ambitious with its messaging than your average car-centric action movie, as the majority of the film deals with the media spectacle that forms after the press learns that a young heiress has been kidnapped. It serves as a pretty interesting satire of America’s emerging 24/7 news culture, with reporters trying to spice up their coverage by bringing in sensationalist rumours and stunts, as the cops bungle up the situation and vigilante citizens try to join in the action.
It seemed a little bit cartoonish and over the top at the time, perhaps, but incredibly, when the infamous OJ Simpson ‘White Bronco’ police chase happened in LA just three months later, in real life, the movie suddenly looked prescient and a bit more spot-on in its social commentary than anyone had realised.
As another credit to the producers of The Chase, there seemed to be an early recognition that Sheen and Swanson, not being the finest masters of the acting craft at the time, might benefit from some other distractions and attractions around them. So, stylistically, the film became something of a glorified MTV music video, with a lot of its many needle drops inspired by the Los Angeles setting of the movie (it was actually filmed in Houston, but LA looms large in the story nonetheless).
The soundtrack features a murderer’s row of early ‘90s LA punk staples, including The Offspring, Rancid, Bad Religion, NOFX, and Rollins Band, and the film itself also features Henry Rollins, along with Anthony Kiedis and Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, in fairly significant supporting roles in the cast.
Rollins is in the ironic role of law enforcement, playing an LAPD cop called Officer Dobbs. Seeing the former Black Flag frontman in a police uniform is instant comedy on its own, but it’s made all the better by the fact that he has a documentary film crew doing a ride-along with him on the day that he’s forced to join the car chase in pursuit of Sheen’s character. This enables Rollins to philosophise to the documentarians about the proper ethics of policing, bearing in mind that this was just two years after the LA Riots of 1992.
“We don’t wanna get any innocent commuters hurt here,” the deeply principled Rollins tells the doc crew, “We’ve got ourselves a very sticky situation”.
Kiedis and Flea, meanwhile, play bozo hippie rednecks named Will and Dale, who decide to use their monster truck to try and stop Sheen’s car themselves, for decidedly less ethical reasons. “Dude, are we gonna be on TV?” Flea asks Kiedis. “You know we are, dude,” Kiedis responds confidently, “you know we are”.
The Chase is, if nothing else, an amusing snapshot of a lot of swirling elements of pop culture in the mid ‘90s: the rise of sensationalist TV news: the distrust of the police after the Rodney King attack, the mainstream popularity of the Chili Peppers at their Blood Sugar Sex Magik peak, and the use of Charlie Sheen as the centerpiece of a Hollywood film. It’s not a good movie by most measures, but it’s definitely an interesting one, especially for managing to satirise the biggest American tabloid news event of 1994 before it had even happened.
